What *is* it with these lads and coffee?

My first thought too!

Now changed, though I still don't think the framing is great

Oh, there are a few old stagers around here (older than me in fandom years at least!)

Though at least one origin story for the 'Black' in Friday - that the bargain-hunters swarm like black ants - has an analogue in Hiberno-English: 'the shops were black [with people]'

And they're not intellectually curious enough to do more than the most superficial investigation into being trans or having ADHD, so they keep on insisting that it's about "conformity to gender stereotypes" or "being distracted"

They have a longstanding sense of themselves as a bit different or special (they probably were at school, in the wider world they're not) which they've been taught to repress with self-deprecation, so when someone asserts difference without self-deprecation it sends them into a rage

I think they both probably had the mild experience of being an outsider that comes from being clever and articulate in childhood, calcified by the relentless conformity and performative self-deprecation required of middle-class teenage girls and young women of their generation.

The main building of my secondary school was of similar vintage, each classroom opening with glass doors onto a courtyard. Except the glass doors had all been painted shut in the 50s, creating the perfect English winter mixture of 'freezing' and 'stuffy'

Beckett kind of got there first in Murphy: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

I think she's trying to do Beckett, like, "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

A possible reading of the quote is that she's putting her kids in the boot, which does suggest she's doing it wrong (like many 80s kids I have memories of travelling in parts of cars emphatically not designed for human passengers, but I thought that was generally frowned on now)

Just dropping this rec here. Month by month analysis of thr first year of Nazi rule, with parallels and differences to present day US Episode 67 -- Project 1933, Pa... - In Bed With The Right - Apple Podcasts share.google/vJA45BamQRnN...

Though I think maybe someone was winding them up about unfamiliarity with canned spray cream

Yes, once you hear it in that cadence you can't unhear it!

Mildly Trumpy vocabulary of paternalistic affection there. Surprised he didn't squeeze in a "cherish"

I have to prepare a class for tomorr...NO.

The made for TV biopic with Patricia Routledge gets a mention!